Potok's previous novels, such as The Chosen, The Promise, In the Beginning, and My Name Is Asher Lev, all feature Jewish protagonists and are clearly derived from the tradition of the male bildungsroman , which treats the maturation of the male from adolescence to young manhood. Davita's Harp represents Potok's first experiment with a female point of view and the novel of female growth and development. Read in the context of his earlier novels,Davita's Harp reveals Potok's tendency to contrast female madness, female suicide, and female emotional instability with male self-possession and heroics, a literary practice that threatens to relegate the female characters of Davita's Harp to some of the more questionable female stereotypes of the Victorian novel. But his novels contain a genuine effort to penetrate the female Jewish psyche and map its emotional rites of passage and social constraints.